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Apr. 25, 2005 I grew up in a racist culture. In the 1950s, racism was alive and well. My stepfather used the N word quite frequently. After all, the great state of Indiana owned bragging rights to the birth of the KKK. Kids I went to school with used the N word. Our state history books showed pictures of black men swinging from ropes in courthouse lawns. We had a mixed race girl in our seventh-grade class that we maliciously called “snowball.” I learned many years later that she had joined the Jim Jones religious cult in Guiana and was among those found dead in that horrific catastrophe. We were vicious in the small town of Logansport. We were vicious all over America. America, home of the free, all men are created equal, for amber waves of grain. It was no better in the 60s. We had serious racial issues in the U.S. Army, nothing new here. Things weren’t much better in the seventies. I had a friend who also happened to be black that taught me a lesson back in the seventies, a lesson I have never and will never forget. I told him that I had “plenty of friends that were black.” He said to me, “can’t you just say that you have plenty of friends? Do you have to add “black” to qualify your friendship?” I have never made that statement again. After all, do you hear anyone saying I have friends that are Irish or German? No. Whites seem to believe that because they made friends with someone who happens to be black, they are forgiven their sins. Blacks have taken the backseat for the past couple of years to Middle Easterners. The heat is off temporarily. Now, the world mistrusts anyone with a turban speaking broken English. We distrusted the Japanese during World War II. Our government put anyone with almond-shaped eyes into detainment camps. Today, the WASPs of this country have changed minimally. We have our token black conservatives, but we don’t like them “black” now do we. We much prefer the lighter chocolate constituents. You know, the ones that look more white than black. We like the darker skinned people to play sports or sing rap music. Does that bother you? It should, because it still is racism. It is still stereotyping of the worse kind. Statistics do not lie. There are more blacks in prison than whites. There are more blacks receiving federally funded entitlement programs. Blacks fall short in school, drop out rates are phenomenal. They are passed by on promotion day at major corporations. Of course, you can name a few blacks that have made it to the top in their fields of study, but only a few.
There is but one damaging statistic that whites
can claim; white men over fifty commit more
suicides than any other group. Are we
addressing those issues? Are we addressing the
fact that women still are underpaid and
overworked in this country, no matter their
race? Are we addressing that our teenagers are
killing themselves more than ever? The only
issues I see on the tables of our leaders are:
privatization of social security, the right to
die, choosing racists and bigoted judges, and
determining if John Bolton is worth a crap as a
nominee to be the next ambassador to the U.N.
Who gives a crap? Get to the issues America.
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